If so, what are your feelings about the recent move to do away with the top users list? What are your feelings on digg in general the last month or so?
My biggest problem with Digg is that they've separated the entertaining stuff (e.g. videos, entertainment) from the main page. Feels more technical now. I agree with taking away the top users (particularly since I wasn't one ... only had 5 front page submissions), but they haven't fulfilled their pledge to make it more networking friendly.
Why would you support removing the top users list though? Just because you were not on it, so all the people that were should be punished? Kind of communistic of you isn't it?
The reason is that tons of bad stories make the front page because a top user diggs it, while tons of great stories never get more than 1 or 2 diggs because a 0-rank user submitted it. I know quite a few people who go and mark the top 5-25 users as 'friends' on digg, simply because they're listed as a top submitter. Then, they'll go through their friends list and digg almost anything that submitter dugg. Many top 100 Diggers have admitted that they Digg EVERYTHING submitted by a friend in interviews. I've seen this myself. When I first started using digg, anything I'd submit would get 1 or 2 diggs. A few hours later, the exact same news story, but on a different site, would be submitted by a top submitter. It would make front page VERY quickly. Now that I've used Digg a lot and have 100 or so "friends", I can submit junk and it gets 10 Diggs automatically ... something good often gets close to front page (and has made front page in 5 cases). The top users is a great way to recognize those who put a lot of effort into making Digg great, but it's also one of the many ways that Digg minimizes the influence that the standard user has on what users read. This is why I now use StumbleUpon far more. It's Buzz section has virtually replaced Digg as a source for all topics, not just tech news. Plus, friends have a much smaller influence on the buzz. Check it out: http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/ Have a great evening, Anita =)